XPath 1.0 String Evaluation

The embedded XPath DSL provides a very flexible and performant way to query xml. However, being an embedded DSL, it has the negative of being wed to the compilation cycle. For those seeking a more direct XPath string parsing based experience Scales provides access via the Jaxen project.

The scales-jaxen project is a sub project and must be included separately as a library dependency.

Other Jaxen Tricks

Jaxen provides various extensions to straight forward querying, including adding java extension functions. If possible, of course, use the embedded DSL, if not ScalesXPath is a Jaxen XPath implementation, allowing calls to setFunctionContext, variableContext etc.